1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a media sharing apparatus and method and, more particularly, to a media sharing apparatus and method, which enable previously converted media to be shared among homogeneous terminals when converting the attributes of media, such as a file format, a video codec, or an audio codec, to fit the characteristics of a media playing terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, with the remarkable development of mobile terminals, a variety of mobile terminals have appeared and been used. Due to the appearance of the iPhone, the field of the mobile terminal has entered a new phase.
However, this variety of mobile terminals all have different hardware qualities such as size, resolution, and the color level of the screens mounted thereon and computer system abilities, and different software characteristics such as supported codecs and installed media players, so that media compatibility between terminals is very low.
In this situation, there frequently occurs the case of media not being played because a terminal does not support a codec when a user utilizes media. That is, due to the hardware and software characteristics of respective mobile terminals and the characteristics of players or the like installed on the mobile terminals, the type of a supported codec differs, and then each terminal does not support the playing of all types of media.
For example, there occurs the case where videos playable on mobile terminals that use Microsoft's Windows mobile Operating System (OS) cannot be played on Apple iPhone terminals. In this case, when the playing of videos is attempted, a message indicative of “unsupported codec” may be displayed. Some codecs may be downloaded over the Internet and then installed, but some codecs may not even be supported.
To cope with this situation, a media conversion method is required and, in particular, a method of sharing media among homogeneous terminals has been required so as to improve the efficiency of media conversion and increase the use rate of a Central Processing Unit (CPU).